Contents

Overview

When someone begins killing criminals throughout Gotham City, suspicion immediately falls upon the Batman who finds himself up against the police and the gangs alike while he struggles to investigate the true culprit, a mysterious vigilante known as the Phantasm before he kills again.

Production

Thanks to the Batman: The Animated Series first season's rave reviews and impressive viewer ratings, Warner Bros. made the decision to push for a full-length animated movie and placed Alan Burnett in charge. Burnett decided to create what was essentially, an expanded animated episode and was inspired to use Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" to depict a show about loss and the passage of time itself in showing the present day Batman and his past self of Bruce Wayne's lost love. Further, Burnett made the choice of deliberating minimizing the presence of Batman's normal rogues gallery and turned the Joker into a supporting character in the movie rather than the main villain.

Shortly after the finalization of the script, Warner Bros. made the decision to release Batman: Mask of the Phantasm as a theatrical release instead of the simple direct-to-video which resulted in the overseas animators to having to redo numerous scenes in order to accommodate the different screen aspects of a theatrical screen and a television screen and also forced them to rush through production in order to make the revised timetable.